What is Christianity?. Douglas Jacobsen

had enjoyed. Outside of China, the Church of the East maintained a significant presence in Persia and Central Asia until the fourteenth century when it finally withered under intense Muslim persecution.

      The “Traditioning” of Christianity

      The three traditions that emerged from the Great Division all saw themselves as legitimately tracing their roots back to Jesus, and each of them perceived their own beliefs and practices as a matchless effort to remain faithful to the gospel. All three groups continued to share a handful of beliefs and practices (for example, all of them believed God was a Trinity and all of them practiced the rites of baptism and the Eucharist), and a few genuinely exemplary individuals (like Isaac of Nineveh) were venerated as saints in all three traditions. However, their differences mattered. It was no longer possible to describe oneself simply as a Christian. After the Great Division, Christian identity required an adjective. You were a Chalcedonian Christian or a Miaphysite Christian or a member of the Church of the East, and it was no longer religiously meaningful to say one was simply a Christian without adding an additional signifier. To a large extent, this remains true today. The dominant Christian traditions have changed over the centuries, but the vast majority of Christians around the world continue to be affiliated with only a very few major traditions.

The root meaning of the word “tradition” is “to hand down,” and Christian traditions are specific packages of religious beliefs, actions, and attitudes that have been handed down by a particular religious community from generation to generation. When some people hear the word “tradition,” they equate it with “unchanging.” For them, tradition represents the way things have always been, year after year, decade after decade; tradition is old fashioned and changeless. But this way of thinking is mistaken. Traditions evolve and grow, albeit often slowly, and handing anything down from generation to generation is a complicated and unpredictable process. In reality, religious traditions are long, multigenerational conversations which can involve a significant amount of argument and conflict. New generations add their own perceptions and concerns to the conversation, sometimes affirming and sometimes critiquing or revising what was done in the past, and older generations (and their contemporary supporters) are sometimes appalled, saddened, or infuriated by those changes. Occasionally, tensions become so great that communities feel compelled to divide, but usually some kind of compromise is reached, and the community moves forward together.

      Over the course of the 1500 years since the Great Division, Christianity has been carried through history by only a handful of major traditions. In the year 650, the Christian world was dominated by the three traditions known as Chalcedonian, Miaphysite, and Church of the East. By the year 1100, the Chalcedonian tradition had divided in two, creating the separate and distinct Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic traditions. Five hundred year later, Catholicism and Orthodoxy had become Christianity’s foremost traditions because the Church of the East had been persecuted into near oblivion and the Miaphysite churches had been severely reduced in size and influence, as well. Since 1500, the Catholic and Orthodox traditions have been joined by two other major Christian traditions: Protestantism, which began in the early 1500s, and Pentecostalism, which first took shape around 1900.

      Currently, the Catholic tradition is home to roughly half the world’s Christians, Orthodoxy serves about 10 percent of the total, and Protestantism and Pentecostalism split the rest with about 20 percent each. Taken together, these four contemporary traditions are embraced by roughly 97 percent of all Christians worldwide, so they are the logical places to begin answering the question “What is Christianity?” The next four chapters describe each of these traditions in detail, highlighting their spiritual and theological distinctives, tracing their divergent histories, and explaining their organizational structures. Whatever Christianity is today, almost all of it has been funneled down to the present through one or another of these traditions.

      Notes

      1 1 Eusebius of Caesarea, Church History, Book 3: Chapter 1, New Advent, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/250103.htm (accessed August 27, 2020).

      2 2 “The Didache,” in Bart D. Ehrman ed., Lost Scriptures: Books that Did Not Make It into the New Testament (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 211–219.

      3 3 Cyprian, On the Unity of the Church, Christian History Institute, https://christianhistoryinstitute.org/study/module/cyprian (accessed August 27, 2020).

      4 4 Martin Palmer, The Jesus Sutras: Rediscovering the Lost Scrolls of Taoist Christianity (New York: Ballantine, 2001), p. 166.